Another concept from functional programming languages making its way to C# and VB is what’s known as pattern matching. At first glance pattern matching looks like a switch/select block, but it is much more powerful.

A common pain point in .NET programming is the amount of boilerplate code necessary to implement immutable objects such as explicitly defined backing stores for each property. Under a new draft specification, C# and VB will be adding what they are calling a “record class” that eliminates most of the effort.

PHP has long filled an important role at Facebook, and over the years the company has constantly sought to improve the language's performance. First there was the Hip Hop Virtual Machine, and now there is the Hack, programming language.

The Rust team has released the latest version of its next generation programming language. New in this release is a redesigned threading system and several refinements as the language moves towards its 1.0 release.

Some big names from Microsoft, Microsoft Research and the University of Washington have been working on a new variant of C# that introduces the concept of readable and immutable references at the language level. To this effect each reference has one of four permission qualifiers that modify variables and parameters: writable, readable, immutable, and isolated.

Ruby 2.0's release manager Yusuke Endoh announced the first preview release of Ruby 2.0 and a targeted release in February 2013. InfoQ talked to Yusuke to learn more about the big new features of Ruby 2.0 (Refinements, keyword arguments, Enumerator#lazy, and more) and what users need to know when upgrading.

Since .NET was still in beta developers have been asking for non-nullable variables with reference semantics. But the problem is far more complicated than simply slapping an attribute or other decoration on the variable. Craig of Twisted Oak Studios has proposed a solution to some of the problems.

Digital Mars, makers of the C++ alternative D, have decided to discontinue the original version of D. They had been maintaining D1 along with its successor D2 since 2007, but with the later now well established they feel it is no longer appropriate to dedicate resources to the older language past December 2012.

Pre-built versions of Dart Editor, the Eclipse-based Dart IDE, are now available, making it easy to try Dart. Frog is a new Dart to Javascript compiler - written in Dart by the creator of the Jython and IronPython projects. Meanwhile the Dart team has been busy explaining the Dart language and proposing features to round out the type system, eg. nullable types and more.

Google has announced a new language: Google Dart and tools. The language and tools are currently considered a technology preview, and an open source release is available now. The language is not yet in Chrome. Dart is dynamic, optional types and reified Generics. Concurrency uses Erlang-style processes called Isolates, share nothing with async message passing.